Work Clean by Dan Charnas Page B

Chef Dwayne LiPuma became a high priest of mise-en-place when he began teaching at the CIA.
    LiPuma had mastered the painstaking planning that allowed him to open up his breath, greet every workday, and cook with love. But he had also discovered the limits of mise-en-place at home. He found that he had to temper his planning impulses at home or he’d drive his wife and his daughter Kaitlyn crazy. Once he realized that mise-en-place had its own right place, he valued and understood it even more. He began to see how his entire work practice of mise-en-place could allow him to relax, greet the evening and weekends, and let go of structure. A happy home was his reward for having compressed his work with mise-en-place. From this, he learned several things: Mise-en-place is not about focus, but rather the process of negotiating focus and chaos. Mise-en-place is an inside job—meaning that it’s something you have to choose, to willingly take on. And mise-en-place is also a shared culture, meaning that while he could have his own mise-en-place in his home, that mise-en-place ended where his wife and kids began, unless he and his family agreed where they shared it.
    His wife, Kareen, began laying her clothes out at night, too. And she found Dwayne’s planning instincts handy, like when she organized a $300-a-plate fund-raising dinner in a fancy Park Avenue apartment. LiPuma loved to plan, and catering was the greatest planning challenge. If you forget an ingredient in a kitchen, you can always walk to the pantry; if you forget a pot, you can go to the storeroom. In catering, if you don’t bring it, you won’t have it.
    On one piece of paper, he wrote his menu. On another, his ingredients and tools. On still another, he ordered that information into a schedule. After a day of planning and shopping, he assembled the tools and ingredients into a neat row of brown shopping bags, each divided and labeled by menu item: soup, pasta, foie gras, scallops, and so on.
    Kareen walked by 2 days’ worth of planning and said: “
Man,
you are anal retentive.”
    â€œNo,” LiPuma said. “This is how chefs think.” He was going to cook in someone’s home, after all.
    When the big evening came, LiPuma found it almost too easy. Kareen and his daughter Kaitlyn became his sous-chefs, but he hardly needed them. They enjoyed a nice, relaxed service, and it turned out to be a great meal. LiPuma had little to do but be present, joke, and smile.
    Kareen smiled back.
My hero.
The Italian without a stallion, riding the range. Just a different kind of range than he had planned.
    Recipe for Success
    Commit to being honest with time. Plan daily.

THE SECOND INGREDIENT
ARRANGING SPACES, PERFECTING MOVEMENTS
A chef’s story: The move maker
    In a kitchen at the New York Institute of Technology’s Long Island campus, a chef taught his new students how to turn potatoes—“turning” being one of the basic techniques of knife work: peeling and cutting vegetables so that they have a smooth and uniform shape.
    One student, Jarobi White, was neither novice nor slouch. He’d been working in restaurants since he was 14 years old. Stuck stuffing hot dogs into buns at an O’Charley’s on Long Island, Jarobi muscled his way onto the hot line by convincing his boss to fire one of his coworkers because, Jarobi claimed, he could do both jobs at once.
    Jarobi’s problem was that he hustled too hard and moved too much. The chef watched Jarobi at his station, potato skins spilling over the table and onto his feet, potatoes rolling off his cutting board. The chef could see Jarobi’s thoughts play out on his face:
Oh, shit, I need a bucket!
Jarobi crossed the kitchen to grab one. The potatoes now went into the bucket, graying as their moist insides came in contact with the air.
Shit, I forgot to fill it with water!
Jarobi crossed the kitchen again to fill the pail.
    Finally the chef-instructor